What makes poor writing? We've seen a not entirely unpredictable backlash against Fifty Shades of Grey from some quarters. It's the reaction that seems to kick in whenever a book (or in this case a trilogy) reaches a certain level of popularity. And I don't think it's completely justified.
It isn't just that it looks like snobbery, although there is, I think, an element of that. The idea that if you are genuinely to appreciate the joy of reading, you must have had a certain level - and a certain kind - of education. If millions of people are enjoying a book, it can't be that good because there can't be that many people with that kind of education. Our 'club' is more exclusive than that ... isn't it?
I said it's not just snobbery because, to be fair, what you think of as good writing will of course be affected by how widely you've read. My reading tastes have certainly changed over the years, and now I would cringe at some of the things I read and enjoyed in my teens and even in my twenties: books full of cliché-ridden characters and hackneyed turns of phrase.
It's also true that we live in a world in which winning a publicity lottery can bring undeserved success - we have celebrities who are famous for nothing more than being famous. And, thanks in no small part to phenomena such as YouTube, people and things can gain incredible popularity (or notoriety) for the most trivial of reasons.
But even if a snowball of hype is how Fifty Shades of Grey achieved its initial success, people are still reading it and they're still enjoying it.
And that's the point: if a particular writing style succeeds in firing your imagination, taking you off to another reality, painting pictures in your mind ... then that writing is good for you. A cliché is a cliché only if you've encountered it many times before.
What's more, if it fails to do those things for someone else, I don't think that person can legitimately say that it's objectively 'bad', even if it's bad for them.
Of course, you may be able to apply all kinds of objective measures to a piece of literature. You may be able to dissect it, analyse it and come up with the conclusion that it's either good or bad. But if your conclusion is at odds with the reaction of millions of readers, might not the flaw be in the analysis, rather than in the readers?
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1 comment:
It's an interesting subject and something I've pondered on recently. I think what most people want in a book is a compelling story, well-paced with characters they can identify with - whether heroes or anti-heroes. You only have to look at the bestseller lists to see what people enjoy reading and it is mostly escapist - whether thriller or romance. So I think that, however we might want the literary landscape to be, many readers (myself included) can overlook less than perfect writing if the story or characters grab us by the balls!
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